Page 83 of Freed By the Witchbone Knife

More symbols. More equations. Something about angles and sine functions.

He understood absolutely none of it.

But watching her explain it? Watching her pace along the front of the room, gesturing with the marker, her voice taking on a particular cadence when she was passionate about something?

That he understood perfectly.

Today she wore a fitted blouse that did things to her figure—accentuated every curve—and a flowing skirt that swished around her calves as she moved. Professional. Put-together. Sexy as hell without trying to be.

He shifted again, hating his jeans for how painful they were against his swelling cock.

“Let’s talk about Snell’s Law.” Rebecca drew a diagram—a line representing some kind of boundary, with arrows showing light bending as it crossed. “This describes the relationship between the angles of incidence and refraction when light passes between two media with different refractive indices.”

She wrote another equation: n₁sinθ₁ = n₂sinθ₂

A student raised her hand. “So that’s why a straw looks bent in the glass of water example from the text book?”

“Exactly!” Rebecca’s smile was bright, genuine. “The light bends as it moves from water to air because they have different indices of refraction. Your brain assumes light travels in a straight line, so it interprets the image incorrectly. The straw isn’t actually bent—your perception is.”

Several students scribbled down notes.

Axel just stared.

She was bloody brilliant. He’d known that, abstractly. Known she had a PhD. That she’d chosen to teach at a community college when she could have done something more prestigious. But seeing it—seeing her command a room full of students, break down complex concepts like it was nothing, light up when someone grasped what she was teaching⁠—

Mine, his wolf rumbled. Ours.

Aye. She was.

Even if he hadn’t fully claimed her. Even if he was holding back the one thing that would bind them permanently. She was his, and watching her like this only made the possessive ache worse.

“Now,” Rebecca continued, “what happens when light moves from a denser medium to a less dense medium? Say, from water to air?” She drew another diagram, arrows at increasingly steep angles. “At a certain point, we hit something called the critical angle. Beyond that angle, the light doesn’t refract at all. It reflects completely back into the denser medium. This is called total internal reflection.”

She wrote: θc = sin⁻¹(n₂/n₁)

“This is how fiber optics work.” Her enthusiasm was evident. “Light bounces along inside the fiber, never escaping, because the angles are always beyond the critical angle. It’s trapped inside, following the path of the cable.”

Trapped inside. Following a path it couldn’t escape.

He knew something about that.

His gaze tracked her as she moved to the other side of the whiteboard, adding more notes. The way her hips swayed. The curve of her waist. The way she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear when she was concentrating.

He’d had his mouth on her multiple times over the weekend. His fingers inside her. He’d made her come apart again and again, learning exactly what sounds she made when she shattered. And still, it wasn’t enough.

Would never be enough.

A hand shot up near the front. Male. Young. Barely more than a pup. “Professor Miller? I’m still confused about the difference between reflection and refraction. Could you maybe...go over it again?”

It was a valid enough request. But he didn’t miss the way the boy’s eyes lingered on Rebecca. The slight flush on his cheeks. The eager way he leaned forward.

A low growl built in his chest before he could stop it.

The student two seats over shot him a nervous glance. He forced himself to relax, unclenching his fists.

Rebecca, oblivious, launched into a patient explanation. She drew new diagrams, used her hands to demonstrate angles, even pulled out a small prism from somewhere and held it up to show how white light separated into colors.

“Dispersion,” she said, tilting the prism so a rainbow scattered across the whiteboard. “Different wavelengths refract at slightly different angles. That’s why we see the spectrum.”